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Wendy Li, Week 1


It is now early July and I have finally started my lab work. I arrived there at about 9 am on the very first day of my lab and found out that there were only two people in the office—Alex, a graduate student in engineering school, and me. “There should be more people in the office, but most of them went to a vacuum workshop today.” Alex told me. My work officially started at 10:30 am when my post doctor Subarna came to the lab. Familiarizing me with all the facilities in lab, Subarna first gave me a lab tour. Meanwhile, he showed me all the basic operations with vacuum chamber, ellipsometer, as well as the spin coater. During the rest of this past week, I was in the process of making my own films. I learned to cut Si wafer into 1*1 cm pieces and clean the surface of these Si wafer with duster and plasma which can effectively clean up all the extra organic particles from the wafer. Further, I prepared 10 percent polystyrene (PS 8000) toluene solution as the material for spin coating. On Thursday and Friday, with the help of Lexi and Haonan (two graduate students in our lab), I spin coated the Si wafer with PS solution and measured the films’ thickness applying ellipsometer. During free time, I also went to the X-ray room with Lexi and Connor (another graduate student) to watch them operate Xenocs Xeuss 2.0 SAX/WAX to complete beam calibration. What I will complete next week is that I am going to incorporate gold nanorod into the polymer film I coated this week. Following that, I am able to accomplish further tests (e.g. temperature influence) on this gold nanorod embedded film using elliposmeter.

Figure. Spin coated films

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